Jay Gould: From 50 Cents to Black Friday and America's Most Hated Man

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Jay Gould arrived at a rural school with 50 cents and a sack of clothes. He died with a $72 million fortune, a private steam yacht, and armed guards patrolling his estate around the clock. This episode follows the dairy farmer's son from Roxbury, New York, who taught himself surveying and mathematics, then learned in the Panic of 1857 that a crash is a clearance sale for anyone willing to be unsentimental. He bought out a ruined partner's tannery properties and picked up control of the Rutland and Washington Railroad for 10 cents on the dollar.

From there the stakes only rose. Gould, Daniel Drew, and James Fisk beat Cornelius Vanderbilt in the Erie War by flooding the market with newly issued shares, sheltered by Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. In 1869 Gould tried to corner the gold market through President Grant's brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, and the collapse became Black Friday. Yet the same man later mastered the working details of the Union Pacific and by 1882 controlled roughly 15 percent of American railway track.

• A dispute over the Pennsylvania tannery turned physical when David Lee, a relative of Gould's ruined partner, seized the property with armed men.
• As the gold corner failed, Gould quietly sold through other brokers at the peak while his partner Fisk was still on the floor shouting orders to buy.
• In 1873 an impostor calling himself Lord Gordon-Gordon took $1 million in stock from Gould and fled to Canada, where a botched kidnapping attempt nearly sparked a border crisis involving the Minnesota militia.
• Gould commuted down the Hudson to Manhattan aboard his yacht, the Atalanta, to avoid a public that despised him.
• Karl Marx called him an octopus railway king in an 1881 letter, while economist Murray Rothbard argued his new lines undercut railroad cartels and lowered shipping costs.